New achievements

Theron has started to roll
himself over consistently and effectively (as
opposed to the awkward, haphazard way he was
doing it earlier). This is, as I understand, the
first stage of real mobility. He will go from
rolling to crawling to toddling to walking to
running. This will signal the end of life as I
know it.

In other developments,
his gurgling is becoming increasingly
communicative. He has a wider range of sounds,
and he’s starting to attach them to specific
situations. Since these are obviously the first
preludes to speech, I’ve tried getting him to
use real words like “pachyderm,” “cutlass,” and
“mononucleosis,” but so far he won’t repeat
them.

I think he’s holding
back, just to annoy me.

He
spent most of last Saturday sitting on my
shoulder as I walked around Cottonwood Art
Festival. In order to protect his eyes from the
sun, we fitted him with a pair of baby
sunglasses which he enjoyed tremendously. In
fact, he eventually tried to fall asleep in
them. A hat might have been a better investment,
but he doesn’t seem to have gotten any sunburn.
Besides, I stand by decision: sunglasses look
much cooler than a hat, even on a baby.

It starts to sink
in…Some combination of these things has caused
yet another obvious fact to finally sink in
through my (admittedly) thick skull. One of
these days, Theron is going to be a person.

I don’t remember much
of this morning’s dreams, but one of them
involved being at some sort of bus (or maybe
train) station, and calling after Theron to make
sure he made it down to his stop on time. It was
the first time that my brain had really looked
at him as a person, someone I’d eventually have
to negotiate with. It also made it pretty clear
that, emotionally, I’ve been treating him more
as a project. A very time-consuming,
energy-intensive, difficult long-term project,
to be specific.

And, to be honest, I
haven’t really made the change yet. I still see
him mostly as a project. At this point, I think
that’s actually a pretty fair assessment of our
relationship.

Life lessons for
baby
Being the sort of person who likes to lecture
others, I’ve been thinking about what sorts of
things I want to tell my child. Some of them are
simple pieces of advice, like: Never trust
credit card companies; they want to make you a
perpetual debtor. Or, on a related note,
If someone offers you money that you didn’t have
to work for, be very, very suspicious.

Others might require a little more explanation:
Communication is not a good basis for a
marriage. Sometimes it really is okay to
hit someone else. Logical arguments are
only useful up to a point; you have to
understand that people are fundamentally
irrational.

It bears repeating (in case I come back and read
this later) that one of the other great lessons
of my life is that people have to learn from
their own mistakes. Life would be a lot easier
and more pleasant if we were capable of taking
advice, but in practice everybody has to screw
things up really badly a few times. There are
certain lessons (different for everyone) that
have to be learned that way.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons that I
generally don’t talk about religion. If human
beings really were designed, then I think I can
safely conclude that we’re still in Beta
testing. Hopefully they’ll fix most of these
bugs before they release the final product. (And
in that case, I’d like to see a patch for some
of the more egregious flaws in the existing
models…)

So while I hope that Theron will be able to
benefit from my experience, I’m not really
holding my breath.

Another way to tell that I’ve started
thinking of the Podling as a real person: